


Towards a Theory of Gay Imaoka

by brightblackbird



Category: Rookies - Morita Masanori & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon - Japanese Drama, Canon - Manga, Embedded Images, Essays, Meta, Slurs, Speculation, Subtext
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-04 21:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11563707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightblackbird/pseuds/brightblackbird
Summary: This one looks closer at why I find it plausible that Imaoka was actually written as gay, with a huge crush on Hiratsuka, and the various reasons this would have needed to remain subtextual in a sports/delinquent-themed manga being published at the very beginning of the 21st century.(contains one usage of a quoted slur)





	Towards a Theory of Gay Imaoka

My [previous essay](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11504430) examined some of Imaoka's particularly gay moments; this essay will look at why it's plausible that they were deliberately intended that way.  
  
First of all, while the scanlations for Rookies do a great job conveying character, they also insert a lot of slurs that aren't used in the original text. This implies an atmosphere of casual homophobia on a level that does not, in fact, exist. In Japanese, nobody is calling anybody the equivalent of a fag or a bitch.

To my knowledge, the only _actual_ gay jokes in the manga are the sequence where it looks like Aniya and Hiratsuka have been found in a compromising position...

  


and a very short exchange where Hamanaka uses a phrase that could mean two different things and Kamisaka responds with "Lol what are you, GAY?"

  
(惚れ込む, _horekomu_ , to be charmed by)

There's also a single-panel gag where Hiratsuka tries to disguise himself in a girl's uniform, but is still very obviously a large, hairy guy. It's not a "gay joke" per se, but we can take it in the same vein as one, i.e., boys should do X, girls should do Y; when someone tries to mix them up, it's funny.

So, the concept of gayness exists here exclusively as a joke —but it's not quite as vicious in its use as some other sports series. Both occasions are used as punchlines in and of themselves, without any kind of continuation to drive the point home. A few shounen sports series have gay characters; the accepted format is that they're very femme, which is funny, and they express attraction to a straight character, who reacts with disgust; this is also hilarious.

This isn't to suggest that Rookies would have necessarily been amazing in its treatment of an openly gay character. (It's certainly pretty bad with its women.) It's equally possible that Morita would have been uncomfortable even writing one, and that's the reason that gay presence in the series is limited to those two jokes. And it's hard to imagine a character like Sanzo from _Eyeshield 21_ or Koharu from _Prince of Tennis_ fitting into the atmosphere of one of Morita's manga. Boys just don't act like that here.

But, since there's no actual gay character here to make it clear that the author probably wouldn't have written a gay relationship with much respect or seriousness, there does exist another possibility. That being: Imaoka's visibly one-sided fixation on Hiratsuka isn't just a function of the need for a character who reacts to him, and that this was either intended to be subtextual, or it was considered and rejected as something to be addressed in the actual text.

Because there's really, really no way to argue that Imaoka isn't obsessed with Hiratsuka, and nobody else. To a degree that, if one of them were a girl, would clearly indicate some level of romantic interest. The question is whether this was intentional.

* * *

**WHAT WE KNOW:**

  * Imaoka is kind of obsessed with Hiratsuka.


  * At no point is this obsession addressed in the story, either to confirm that it's gay or to deny that it is. 


  * Imaoka does not have the same kind of mini-arc that pretty much every character gets.



**MY POSITION:**

Imaoka being gay is not only a valid fandom interpretation, but a workable, supported theory as to Morita Masanori's actual intention for the character. If we can reasonably assume that Morita-sensei would have written a gay storyline with anything approaching respect, then the subject would have been Imaoka having feelings for Hiratsuka.

The reason I have such strong suspicions about Imaoka is that, while there are any number of fictional characters who don't show an interest in the opposite sex, there are far fewer with the kind of fixation on another character of the same sex that reads so strongly as a romantic interest. For the purposes of this essay I'll call that "actively gay" versus the "passively gay" that's communicated to the audience through a lack of overt heterosexuality. Within the context of fiction, this is an important distinction because a passively gay character can be used to avoid challenging the audience by being "too gay". An example in Western media would be the middle-aged confirmed bachelor whose hobbies include knitting, interior design, and not having a love life of any kind.

Actively gay characters, of course, can also have their interest in another character used as jokes, Smithers from The Simpsons being the most obvious example. But an actively gay character does at least require a writer to present some level of gay attraction in their work. There's less room to deny what's going on. And a coded or subtexual actively gay character is much easier to identify as a gay character, because, you know, there's something you can point to that we can all agree is gay.

* * *

**What's Going On Here?**

For the purposes of this essay, Imaoka's first appearance will be not be considered part of his actual character. This isn't just me choosing to discount the scene where he shows unambiguous interest in a woman; he and Hiratsuka genuinely feel like different characters in that scene. At that stage, the supporting cast was still being established. There are a few scenes that imply other members of the club are going to become part of the core team, only for them to quit the club fairly soon after and become background characters for the rest of the manga. Hiratsuka and Imaoka's first appearance _as themselves_ is when they see Shinjo confronting the upperclassmen by the bikes, and by the time they enter the classroom to tell the girls what's going on, their future dynamic is set.

In his first appearance, Imaoka is about the same as the other boys. He's so aggressive that he feels like an entirely different character. And this is reflected in his speech: he doesn't have very many lines to analyze, but he does drop a やろーぜ that's very typical of how the other boys would speak. By his second appearance, when he's in character for the first time, he's switched to the much less aggressive ね, which he continues to use throughout the manga. (He does drop the occasional ぞ, however.) One of the most distinguishing ways he ends his sentences is もんね, the effect of which is pretty childish: it's assertive, but not at all in the aggressive, masculine way Hiratsuka makes most of his statements. Even Mikoshiba, the most polite and unassuming member of the team, doesn't talk like that.

This isn't at all to say that means he's gay. The stereotypical gay character in a shounen manga like this probably does end a lot of sentences with ね, but he would also include many, many more markers of feminine speech, none of which Imaoka uses. He doesn't speak more formally than the other boys, either; he switches じゃない to じゃねー just like the rest of them. He's just... not remotely as pushy, and it stands out in comparison to the other characters. He's also fairly laconic, often adding parts of his sentence after the gist has been finished in a way that suggests his speech is a little halting. ("故障してんだね　これ　きっと") None of this is grammatically incorrect in Japanese, it's just a little distinctive compared to standard written communication.

One other noticeable thing is that he never uses any kind of second-person pronoun for Hiratsuka. This is why a lot of what he says seems a little strange in how he adds "Hiracchi" at the end every single time: "All you did was strike out four times, Hiracchi" never had a you in there to begin with. It's common to avoid pronouns like this in Japanese, but given how close they are and how long they've known each other, it's a little strange that he never once uses おまえ (that being how Hiratsuka addresses him when he's not being rude with てめー). Again, this is not a Gay Thing, it's just a minor note that says something about their relationship... not that I can say what that might be.

One argument against deliberate gay subtext might be that Imaoka is just a very quiet, passive person and Hiratsuka, as his best friend, is the one he feels most comfortable reacting to. However, speaking from my personal experience as a very quiet, passive person who had a few school friends who filled a similar role for me: I was _never_ as pathetically obsessed with any of them as Imaoka is with Hiratsuka.

Hiratsuka, for his part, is if not Morita's favorite character, then pretty darn close—as evidence, I will cite Morita's choice of characters to draw for Dragonball and One Piece's anniversary tribute books: Mr. Satan and Franky, both quite similar in their hairy shouty-ness. There's also the fact that Hiratsuka at the end of the manga is no less disastrously awful as a person and friend than he was at the beginning. If anything, he's worse. Despite how relentlessly annoying he is to everybody except Imaoka, he's allowed to keep it up because his character is enjoyable to Morita just as it is. He gets a few serious moments, but chiefly he exists as comic relief. Most of what he does requires some kind of narrative punishment, but not to a degree that it seems unfair. So Imaoka exists both to call him out—as his best friend, and only as proportionate response to his actions—and to worry about him, so that we as the readers don't start to feel too bad for him, because at least he has someone who cares. As a result, Imaoka is often the only character paying attention to him, most hilariously in the Sono-go one-shot where Hiratsuka is destroyed at being passed over by the pro draft, but there's absolutely no reaction to this by Kawato, or the narrative itself, because Mikoshiba is the character who matters at the moment.

So, from this angle, it's possible to view the obsession as an inadvertent byproduct of his character existing for that purpose. The problem with that is that Imaoka _is supposed to be a major character_. He was introduced in volume 3. Hamanaka, introduced in volume 14, and Akaboshi, introduced in volume 15, both have enough time for some character development. There are multiple characters introduced into the manga for the sole _purpose_ of having short character arcs, some as short as a single chapter. Okada, the other quiet and laid-back member of the team, gets a chapter to himself. (Okada also appears to have a life that doesn't revolve around some other member of the team.) From a planning perspective, there's no conceivable reason for one member of the team to make it to the final volume without having any time devoted to how his inner life has changed since the beginning. The drama had to add in a storyline about him being attacked while practicing his pitching alone, because otherwise his development is visibly, jarringly lacking when compared to the other characters.

And there is, in fact, a storyline introduced for Imaoka. He isn't interested in the spotlight, Hiratsuka is; but Imaoka turns out to be more useful because he can be the relief pitcher. There are a few scenes where Hiratsuka is resentful of this, and the logical conclusion would have been some kind of exploration of how their friendship is balanced. Hiratsuka views Imaoka as a sidekick and footnote, while Imaoka has a more realistic view of Hiratsuka, but absolutely no ambition or awareness of his own talents.

But then Imaoka reaches the height of his achievements by getting a single strikeout against Megurogawa, after which they discover he can only throw underhand, and the entire Nikogaku team nearly falls apart in the resulting disaster. Meanwhile Hiratsuka hits the game-winning home run, even though he wasn't chosen as a starting player. After the game with Megurogawa, there's very little focus on Imaoka in games, and Morita actually introduces a new character to act as relief pitcher. He's a fairly solid fielder and a reliable batter, but he doesn't stand out much. Hiratsuka never seems envious of him again, and Imaoka never expresses any more ambition after "I wanna get a strikeout." Either this storyline was completely dropped out of nowhere, or we're to assume that all of Imaoka's suffering during the game was enough to soothe Hiratsuka (offscreen) back into the normal routine of their friendship. 

And, granted, the second option is not out of character for Hiratsuka. But this leaves us with a relationship in an uplifting, inspiring shounen manga that is examined by the narrative and then receives negative development into a deeply unhealthy dynamic, and a character on the protagonist team who just kind of learns to live with mediocrity for the rest of his life. It feels to me, honestly, like a genuine examination of their relationship would have involved something that was not possible to include in the main narrative. Imaoka becomes much quieter as a character after the Megurogawa game, and this is also the point where he starts to exist more as an accessory to Hiratsuka. Given that his attitude towards Hiratsuka is present from his first in-character appearance, it also seems reasonable that his feelings for Hiratsuka could have been an element of the story by the Megurogawa game, to the point that it was not possible to change or undo this.

(This also means that if he was at any point intended to have feelings for Hiratsuka, that was never something Morita felt the need to _write out_ of his character. Imaoka never stops being very fixated on Hiratsuka, there's just less focus on him in the narrative. In fact, the way he acts around Hiratsuka ends up being the single most important part of his character. And, I should note, if there had been an arc where their dynamic is addressed more directly... they wouldn't, realistically, have changed that much. Hiratsuka is never going to accept second billing in any relationship; Imaoka is never going to seek out the spotlight. They are first and foremost the characters used as comic relief. But within the framework of how their characters function, there was room for a little bit of growth. Even if only for Imaoka.)

* * *

**Publishing Environment**

The final argument against the gay Imaoka theory is that _Rookies_ ran from 1998 to 2003 in Weekly Shonen Jump, the most mainstream magazine of boys' manga. Morita's previous serialization, _Rokudenashi Blues_ (1988-1997), the one that really started his career, was a super-macho delinquent comedy/fighting series, and this aesthetic carries over into Rookies. There's an inescapable homoeroticism to most delinquent manga, but within the worlds they present and the audience they court, there's not much room for a character who deviates from that hypermasculine atmosphere by actually _being_ gay.

The character I've already mentioned from _Eyeshield 21_ (2002-2009), Sanzo, is an extremely minor one. He's featured in a few throwaway gags and omake pages, but it would be easy to read the manga several times without learning his name. _Prince of Tennis_ (1999-2008) probably pioneered the current trend of deliberately marketing sports series to a female audience with gay subtext, but its canonically gay characters (Koharu and Yuuji) are introduced fairly late in the series, so I'm hesitant to say they would have been around at a time when Morita might have been writing a character as gay.

Togashi Yoshihiro managed to include at least one overt gay relationship in the pages of WSJ (antagonists Sensui and Itsuki in _Yu Yu Hakusho_ (1994-1996) are in a relationship; Hisoka from _Hunter x Hunter_ (1998-present) is deeply, deeply problematic but clearly not straight); Ryuu from _Shaman King_ (1998-2004) is openly attracted to Lyserg; _Bleach_ (2001-2016) has Suifeng, the aggressively lesbian Chizuru and the flamboyant Charlotte Chuhlhourne; an early arc of _Naruto_ (1999-2014) has Haku and Zabuza; _Dragonball_ (1984-1995) had General Blue way back in its early days; and characters like Bon Clay (and later Ivankov) in _One Piece_ (1997-present) combine trans or genderfluid identities with a general suggestion that they're attracted to men. ( ******* see footnote at bottom)

However, because of shounen manga's target audience, and because WSJ in particular is extremely mainstream and profit-oriented, all of these characters have some mitigating factors that make them less threatening to a straight status quo. Either they're evil, or they die, or they're very minor characters, or they're sexually aggressive to the point of harassment (funny harassment!), or they're presented in a way that is fundamentally somewhat unsettling. Often other characters are viscerally and vocally disgusted by them in a way used to emphasize that gay attraction or non-normative gender presentation set you apart from other people.

There are even more caveats you could add to that list. In Haku and Zabuza's case, the relationship is presented as a deeply redeeming one, perhaps Zabuza's only redeeming trait, but it is ultimately one between an adult man and a fairly young teenager. The most positive spin is that perhaps it's only romantic from Haku's end. In _Bleach_ , Chuhlhourne's identity is chiefly based on his presentation and not on any open statement that he's gay or trans/genderfluid. On the opposite side, _Bleach_ also gives us Yumichika, a character depicted more positively who is extremely gay from a fan's perspective but not as "confirmed" as Chizuru. There's also a little bit of wiggle room for the audience with Suifeng, but I included her in the list above since you would have to be pretty obtuse to deny what's going on there. In Suifeng's case, it's not quite clear whether her feelings are reciprocated, and they're focused initially through the lens of her desire to battle Yoruichi. I consider this another form of _mitigating gay desire_ for a straight audience; it's presented as something destructive either to the self or to its target.

Note that I'm not trying to rank these works from bad to good, or call out any of them as exceptionally helpful or harmful representation, I'm simply pointing out some examples of how LGBT identity is presented in this particular magazine. I'm excluding some later WSJ series like _Kuroko's Basketball_ , both because I'm not familiar with them and because they started in a significantly different "era" from _Rookies_.

With all that taken into account: Imaoka was introduced in the pages of this magazine no later than 1999. Is there any possible way Morita conceived him as a gay teenage boy? He is, on some level, depicted as quite different from the other boys, and not just in the way he speaks. He bats on one leg, both right- and left-handed; he pitches underhand; when he takes a baseball to the nose his response is uncontrollable giggling.

Still, taken against the usual depictions of gay men in shounen manga, Imaoka would have been a very, very startlingly normal one. He's used as comic relief, but his character is established without reliance on stereotypes. He's quiet, and a little strange, but this isn't treated as a bad thing. One might argue that this level of sensitivity in itself means it probably wasn't intentional. He would just be an awkward kid with a huge crush on his best friend. But if he _is_ gay, then his constant concern for Hiratsuka being played as part of the joke does become a little... realistically cruel. And his feelings are definitely unrequited during the events of the manga. Another point often required to make a gay character less threatening to a mainstream audience.

(He gets hit in the butt a couple of times while batting, which I'm hesitant to call coding on any level, but it is kind of funny because his response in the scanlations is the same phrasing as the joke about how "yaoi" is short for "stop, my ass hurts".)

We therefore have two levels of creative intent here. First is Morita-sensei's intention, and the next layer is to what degree that would have been hampered by editorial input. I've addressed the second one; my conclusion is that yes, if Morita made it clear that he intended to have a gay character be a central member of the main cast in his sports/delinquent manga, an editor would have told him to nix it. We can't work backwards from this to conclude that he obviously was planning on it, but it does streamline the process of the thought experiment. If A, then B, resulting in C.

Therefore: _if_ Morita intended to write Imaoka as gay, and was determined to do so no matter what, it could _only_ have manifested in the way he is written in canon. A (meAnt to be gAy) doesn't follow necessarily from C (aCts like a Coded Character), but I find that taking A as a given explains a lot about Imaoka's personality and the way he's used (and not used) within the narrative.

* * *

**Dodging Denial**

Now, if we assume that Imaoka is in fact a coded gay character: this is not ideal representation. He has very, very bad taste in men. And, headcanons about their future life aside, Hiratsuka is clearly not reciprocating his feelings during the events of the manga. He's not even pulling his weight as a friend.

And yet... they're still best friends. Hiratsuka never shows any interest in hanging out with anyone at the expense of the time he spends with Imaoka. When he's first introduced, he seems closer to Wakana than he is later on, but he's still consistently shown in Imaoka's company. He actively invites Imaoka to come with him when he joins the choir. He's shocked and offended when Imaoka goes back to the baseball club, even before Touko appears in the scene. He asks Imaoka several times to contribute to the conversation by backing him up—though he seems to abandon this after Imaoka makes it clear how rarely he's in the mood to agree.

Much later, Hiratsuka seems to be on track for some kind of friendship with Hamanaka, who's offering respect and admiration for his new senpai. Hiratsuka then abandons any attempt to keep this going; he complains that Hamanaka tries to "stand out" too much, while Hamanaka is _in the process_ of giving him a personalized cheering routine. He defaults back to the abrasive way he treats everybody else on the team. But he keeps hanging out with Imaoka. Who never comes close to complimenting him at any point during the manga.

So, evidence suggests that Hiratsuka is not interested in starting or maintaining a close relationship with anyone else. At all. Despite Imaoka providing the one kind of interaction he should hate the most—being called on his nonsense by someone who pays attention to all his failures and sees him more clearly than he sees himself. And, while he once or twice shows zero concern over Imaoka getting injured in some way... after the first game with Youga Daiichi, Hiratsuka is more or less blocked out of every scene where Imaoka gets injured. We have no idea what his response is, because he's not shown in any way.

It is feasible that he's somewhat upset; when Mikoshiba gets sucker-punched in volume 15, the two characters first shown responding furiously are Sekikawa and... Hiratsuka? Who doesn't seem to even _like_ Mikoshiba? He's also shown looking a little horrified, for once, at someone else's suffering, when Mikoshiba runs into the backstop and passes out. (In fact, he looks more concerned over that than Imaoka does.) He doesn't show positive emotions towards other people easily, but these two incidents hint that he's not quite as nasty as he acts.

Imaoka is also blocked out of a few scenes near the end of the manga where Hiratsuka actually needs and deserves some kind of encouragement. This is a really strange pair of facts, given how much evidence there is that they've been very close friends for years. Not even silent reaction shots?? Even though there are numerous shots of the whole team reacting to something, in which Hiratsuka's only contribution is to grimace furiously so he can prove how cool he is? Nor is there ever any follow-up when Imaoka rushes up to him in concern. Does he help him up? Give him band-aids? We don't know. The interaction ends there, because it's served its comedic purpose. It doesn't seem like he's very good at encouraging or comforting him when he needs it, either. All of _those_ sequences end with Imaoka standing there wordlessly and uselessly.

There's also the choking thing, but that's played more as slapstick than anything. The one time we see a panel that follows up with Imaoka afterwards, he's visibly fine within seconds and seems more distressed by Touko approaching them than by the fact that he was being throttled moments ago. There is violence in Rookies that we're meant to take as something serious, and that's always shown as something with physical consequences. Imaoka getting strangled for mouthing off is not an ideal friendship situation, but it's also not something with any lasting impact on him. Nobody who sees it happening ever reacts to it, not even the adults, so it's pretty obviously not supposed to be that serious.

While it's never really made clear on-panel what positive things Hiratsuka is bringing to the friendship, Imaoka is in fact capable of turning Hiratsuka down and refusing to do things he doesn't want to do. He has extremely bad taste and is easily led around by the nose, but he isn't unhappy with the friendship. Their relationship is portrayed as sturdy enough to withstand Hiratsuka's.... everything. Nothing is introduced into the story to no-homo Imaoka's behavior. He doesn't (in the manga) have a love interest jammed into the story to make it clear he likes girls. This despite the fact that, per the two gay jokes mentioned earlier, Morita is definitely aware that it's possible to interpret male/male interactions in such a way.

 _Kyou Kara Ore wa!!_ (1988-1997) wasn't published in WSJ, but it's another delinquent-themed manga that has a somewhat similar dynamic between the clownish Imai and Tanigawa, his shorter follower who sticks by his side when it's probably a better idea not to.

In this case, though, other characters do comment on it, so there’s an opportunity to deflect that interpretation and play it as a joke. And there are several story arcs emphasizing that both are _very_ into girls even though Tanigawa has pledged eternal devotion to Imai.

 

> __you know, bro stuff._  _

So why, with such a rich vein of potential no-homo comedy to be tapped, does _Rookies_ never address the elephant in the room with this particular friendship?

* * *

**Dramatic Alterations**

The drama adaptation of the manga adds a metric ton of heterosexual horniness to Imaoka's character which is notably absent from the manga. This didn't seem necessary for any other character. In fact, the drama removes a lot of horniness from Sekikawa and Yufune in particular. Possibly because their characters don't fall into the Actively Gay category I mentioned above, where behavior towards another male character is exaggerated to the point that it seems to surpass fujo-baity levels. With their interest in women removed, their manga characters would only fall into the Passively Gay category. Their existences aren't predicated on reacting to another male character.

Make no mistake, the drama definitely plays up the gayness to a certain extent; everyone is paired off with another boy to appear together in reaction shots, stand next to each each other in group shots, climb on each other while frolicking in the river, etc. So, the creative staff for the drama, which aired in 2008, made an active decision to use gay subtext as a marketing strategy that by this time had been established as common tactic for Jump's sports series. (See _Tennis, Prince of_ , and _Basketball Which Kuroko Plays, The_.) But this kind of subtext is never supposed to include any reading of the characters as gay people. This is understood. So why bother making Imaoka not _only_ interested in peeking at the nurse's panties, not _only_ the kind of guy who looks at advertisements for porn videos in class, but also explicitly harboring a huge crush on the nurse?

I can't definitively say that this was an attempt to make him seem less like he could genuinely be gay, but taken in conjunction with everything else? Definitely suspicious. Because other aspects of his and Hiratsuka's characters and relationship are changed. They're on a much more even level, and Hiratsuka is actually a somewhat pleasant person. Imaoka doesn't regularly puncture his ego, and Hiratsuka doesn't respond by strangling him. Instead Hiratsuka will make some silly statement (confusing "potential" with "botential"), Imaoka will correct him, and Hiratsuka will respond by agreeing cheerfully, as if he doesn't realize he made a mistake in the first place.

Some of these changes were made for obvious reasons. In a live-action movie, nobody wants to see some jerk strangling his tiny friend for saying the wrong thing, and nobody wants Hiratsuka stealing the focus of every scene by throwing loud, distracting tantrums. But the reason for their absorbing everybody else's hetero perviness, to the point that they're basically different characters? Was it really necessary to go quite that far?

Then again, the drama also went out of its way to add an accidental kiss and a scene where Imaoka slaps Hiratsuka's crotch to wake him up, so their motives remain mysterious.

* * *

**Wrapping It Up**

**  
** In the end, there's no way to confirm this without confirmation from Morita-sensei. Since of his lengthier works only _Rookies_ is fully scanlated, I also can't do a deeper analysis of the frequency and tone of any gay jokes included in _RokuBlues_ or _Beshari Gurashi_.

BUT. In 2016, he [drew them together for no reason](http://en.rocketnews24.com/2016/02/10/manga-anime-and-video-game-artists-draw-each-others-pictures-with-surprising-results/), over a decade after _Rookies_ ended. He didn't draw anyone from the more recent _Beshari Gurashi,_ or from _RokuBlues_ , which established him as an artist. He drew them when the original image was clearly two moeblob girls; if his intention was to go for a crossdressing joke, he didn't make that joke with two random guys. He chose two recognizable characters from a shounen work that was popular enough to get a drama adaptation that set records at the box office. To me, this says that at the very least, he's (still!) extremely fond of them, and that he considers them a unit to the point that if he draws Hiratsuka in a maid outfit, this must be followed with Imaoka in a chef outfit. Not, you'll notice, any of the actual main characters. And this poster was hung in actual trains and train stations; he has no problem with the idea of the wider public seeing a character from his macho sports manga in a maid outfit.

(Of course, once you've drawn a naked chibi version of a character and included his nutsack for absolutely no reason, there's not much further to take things.)

And in 2017, he revealed the characters as they are three years after graduating high school. In the context of how their characters behave throughout the entire manga, it's very, very hard to see Imaoka with a video camera and _not_ connect this to Hiratsuka's chosen """career""" as a Youtuber. And this is way more than Morita's given either Aniya and Touko—the alleged _actual_ romantic subplot of Rookies—or Maeda and Chiaki, the main couple of _RokuBlue_ s. (On the 7/7/17 episode of _Sono saki~Nozoite Mitara Sugokatta!!!_ , shortly after [showing and explaining the three-years-later drawing](http://funnuraba.tumblr.com/post/162763411587), his response to, "Are Maeda and Chiaki married?" is, "I doubt it." (「無理でしょう？」 ))

So, taking into account Morita's lack of any desire to make Imaoka seem straight (the sequel chapter he released in honor of the drama contains an Imaoka who's absorbed zero heterosexuality from his drama counterpart; he has three lines, all about Hiratsuka, and seems to think Hiratsuka has a chance of being drafted into the pro leagues), the era and venue in which Rookies was published, and the strange hole where Imaoka's character arc should have gone? I think the idea of Imaoka being gay has enough weight to advance from headcanon to theory. And my hope is that some day the world will be strong enough to accept it as reality.

**Author's Note:**

>  ******* In Japan, sexual orientation is popularly conflated with gender identity— even accepting people may assume that if you're a man attracted to men, you must want to present yourself in an exaggeratedly feminine way. This is not something specific to Japan, and it's not how every Japanese person perceives or writes things, but it is something present in Japanese popular culture that's going to be noticeable to a reader from the U.S., where this idea is no longer as prevalent. (Creators in the U.S are also able to be open about how their work is shaped by their personal lives and identities in a way that mangaka often aren't.)
> 
> I bring this up because it means some characters can't really be described definitively as "gay" or "trans" or "genderfluid" or whatever, and even if you asked the creator directly, they likely would not have a specific label in mind. This is both because English terms don't always fit into every culture, and because fictional depictions are always filtered through the creator's level of awareness.
> 
> Japanese pop culture is sometimes described as "behind" American pop culture in this respect, but that's not really accurate. American comics have simply found it profitable in recent years to become more inclusive on some levels, while it's not currently profitable for mainstream shounen manga to shake this notion up on a wide scale. If you're an older anime fan, you definitely remember a period where Japan seemed to be leagues ahead of the U.S., with LGBT characters in Cardcaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon, etc., who had to be actively censored when those works were brought to the West.  
> 


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